What we did for our summer vacation...

We had an exciting summer vacation... a few things we did include:

Visiting the grandparents and Anabelle/Livy's cousin Victoria in DC. While there, the girls had lots of fun going to the zoo, the aquarium, and riding the merry-go-round with Mama Bear and Papa Bear. They were also very glad to spend time with their uncles and aunt. However, I almost had to fire Maria, since she forgot to take pictures during the entire 4 weeks out there.... :p Here's one of the few pictures she took:

Maria and the girls also visited the Tuttles, a family we knew in Israel (they moved to DC around the time we returned from Israel). Their daughter Rachel was like the big sister Anabelle never had, and was always so nice to Anabelle at church and when we visited their house occasionally... Anabelle still talks about Rachel occasionally when something reminds her of Rachel (e.g., two days ago Anabelle saw a photo booth and said "I've been in one of those before with my friend Rachel in Israel", and then tonight, while reading a book about hamsters, Anabelle told me about Rachel's gerbil).

It's a long story, but we spent about a month and a half in Provo, Utah. There Anabelle took some swimming lessons a local water park. At the end, her teacher took her on some of the water slides.

Anabelle and Livy got to go to a couple dinosaur museums. 

Where they learned a number of things, as follow:

1) Mommy likes dinosaurs:

2) One should be careful about standing behind large sauropods, since there is a lot of fiber in those leaves they eat:

3) You can design dinosaurs with two tails, but they take twice as much time to clean up after:

4) Even if you are excavating and find dino fossils, you still can't pull them up since they seem to be cemented to the museum floor:

5) It's more fun to excavate dinosaurs when they're in a block of chalk:

Over the summer we also attended the annual Llama Fest held at the Spanish Fork Hare Krishna Temple

And the girls went to Fish Lake, which is the lake where Grandma Fae used to go fishing in when she'd go on vacation with her family 50-60 years ago. While I stayed home and madly worked on my doctoral thesis proposal (due that weekend), they all went with Grandpa Mark, Grandma Fae, uncle Oleg, aunt Janalee, and her cousins Petya, Florentine, and Timok.

While these are only a sampling of the things we did, you can see, it was a good summer, packed with lots of fun. Though it's nice to finally be back in San Diego and getting back to normal life!